Category Archives: Marketing Myths

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It seems obvious, a brand’s currently heaviest buyers generate more sales and profits (per customer) so they should be the primary target for marketing.

This is commonly held misconception. The rise of direct marketing and CRM gave this fallacy a big plug, after all it can be hard to justify sending expensive letters to light customers.

But if our aim is to grow sales then our efforts should be directed at those most likely to increase their buying as a result of our attention. It takes only a moment of thought to realise that customers who already buy our brand frequently are going to be difficult to nudge even higher.

If, instead, our aim is to prevent sales losses then heavier customers would seem more promising – after all they represent a lot of sales we might lose. But then again, they are more loyal, other brands make up less of their repertoire, their habit to buy our brand is more ingrained, our brand has rather good mental and physical availability for them. In short, they aren’t particularly at great risk of defecting nor of downgrading.

So the idea that heavy buyers of your brand (“golden households” or “super consumers”) are your best target is flawed. Dangerously simplistic.

Here is another nice quote from Steve Jobs, interviewed on stage alongside Tim Cook (current CEO). He was asked if Apple’s goal was to win back dominant share of the PC market

“I’ll tell you what our goal is…to make the best personal computers in the world and products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want to do that [raises voice] at the lowest prices we can, but I have to tell you there is some stuff out there in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and friends…and we just can’t do it, we can’t ship junk”.

Job losses at icon brand companies make big headlines. Politicians are addicted to giving taxpayers money to large businesses, including trying to lure them into their electorate. We all love the idea of having the next Apple or Google in our electorate, but look at the US economy and its poor performance over the past decade despite having these two emerge as giants over that period.

It’s hard to name icon companies from Singapore or Netherlands or Austria yet these are some of the richest, most productive economies in the world. It’s a reminder to government that any modern economy is diverse and complex, even a Google is a tiny player within it. What matters much more than having a few of these star companies is that thousands of less-than-household name companies can do business easily. e.g. an efficient retail sector is a stark difference between highly productive and less productive economies. I know this isn’t sexy, but it seems to be the truth.

This means that government should concentrate on infrastructure, on good and simple laws, less red tape, flexible workforces, access to training/re-training.

I note that Australian government investment in Roseworthy Agricultural College, and the Waite Institute, and setting the levy that funded the Grape and Wine R&D Corp has returned an astonishing return – creating Australia’s modern export wine industry (and better wine for Australians). But all attempts to save the industry in times of a high Australian dollar and so on (e.g. the 1980s grape vine pull) did little good, just put money in the pockets of a few lucky businesspeople.

There is a very long (too long!) history of marketing writers debating what ‘true loyalty’ is. This is a perfect example of what the twentieth century’s most famous philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper, called essentialism: seeking to define the essence of an abstract theoretical concept (Esslemont & Wright, 1994). We can forever debate issues (like, What is true love? What is marketing?), but as these questions are simply about the definitions we decide to use there is no logical way of ever resolving them. To suggest that one approach captures the true meaning of brand loyalty, while another (by implication) does not, is bad philosophy, and bad science. Contrary to popular belief the purpose of science is not to say what things are but rather to say things about things: how they behave, how they relate to other things. Physicists can tell you a great deal about the properties and behaviour of things like gravity and mass while there is no rigid definition of what these things ‘truly’ are. Hence, this book is about what we can say about real world loyalty-type behaviour, both verbal behaviour (expressed attitudes) and overt behaviour (buying).

“Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts; theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they raise” (Popper, 1976).

A new study of 10 years of medical research in one of the very top journals shows that reversals are not uncommon. This is where later evidence shows that a new medical practice is no better or worse than older practice (or doing nothing).

40% of the studies that examined a current practice found it shouldn’t have been adopted.

The problem is partly that tests of new practice tend to be biased towards being positive. So later, better, studies are going to find that a good number of their findings were wrong.

Also practice tends to adopt invasive practices perhaps due to patient pressure, and doctor desire, to “do something, rather than nothing”. Though there are also reversals to current practices that refuse to take up something new (e.g. vaccinate, take aspirin) because of some (often theory-based) fear, which turns out to be unfounded.

This shows that the advance of (medical) science, and evidence-based practice, is not a straight line. Reversals are common.

Now in marketing practice the tinniest whiff of evidence that something might be useful is enough to send lemmings running for the cliff! Fear of missing out? I’d put both the widespread adoption of banner and search advertising, marketing mix modelling, ROI calculations, and equity monitors in this camp. We praise doing something new, even if it is harmful.

Then there are things like loyalty programs which were adopted without any evidence at all, just theory.

When evidence finally does emerge that a practice is flawed there can be great reluctance to accept it – especially amongst those who make money from it. For example, how many market research agencies have changed their practices in presenting segmentation data after we showed comprehensively that brands do not differ from their competitors in the types of customer they attract? For example, marketers are still launching new loyalty programs with the aim of extracting lots more business out of existing customers.

And not enough marketers worry when “emperor’s new clothes” type questions highlight the astonishing lack of credible evidence and testing of techniques like mix modelling or brand equity based predictions. People even say things like “but if I stop doing this, what will I do instead”, as if doing something useless is better than doing nothing. Marketing needs to grow up, because the medical example shows how easy it is to get something wrong even when you are as careful and circumspect as doctors are.

ABSTRACT This study examines the extent of consumer information search and consideration of financial services brands. It uses data from two surveys of purchasing behavior. This study finds a surprisingly low level of consumer consideration, either by personal enquiry or via the internet. The most common consideration set comprised only one brand, and this was the case for both high-value and low-value services. The managerial implication is that services marketers should make brand salience a top priority, with the competitiveness of their offer not being the primary driver of sales. If a financial services brand is salient to a consumer, there is a very high chance they will purchase that brand, without extensive comparison of the merits of alternatives.